A Big Feather
A Big Feather
From Animal Behavior Conservancy
Tina the burrowing owl is one of our smallest residents, but like any small bird, she takes up a lot of space with her personality. Our Andean condor is steadily molting her primary and secondary wing feathers, and to get a sense of how big they are and how small Tina is, we stacked a newly molted tail feather against each other. This feather is longer than my forearm and not even the condor's longest feather.
I got to see some condors and play around with some of their giant feathers when I was at the National Aviary. Those are some impressively large birds!